SEO audit; how to learn? Do you need to strengthen the SEO of your website and try new positioning strategies on Google? Before investing money in any campaign, you need an SEO audit! These audits are beneficial to know the weaknesses and strengths of your website. Do you know how a fantastic SEO audit is done? In this post, I teach you how to make it yourself.
The word ‘audit’ may not be very friendly to some people. Still, although it may not seem like it, it can be enjoyable and, above all, the beginning of any winning strategy by any SEO and web positioning agency.
An SEO audit is the genesis of any SEO and digital marketing plan that we can think of implementing. It doesn’t matter our niche, the size of our company, our digital marketing budget, or how long we’ve been leading Google searches; Making a thorough review of the current situation and the positioning of our website in search engines is essential to improve or to stay at the top of web search engines.
From experience, I know that many entrepreneurs, or managers of the marketing or commercial department, who have online businesses do not understand what an SEO audit is and that many others do not give it the importance it deserves. However, I see all of them arrive at our offices hoping that, almost with the snap of our fingers, we will do magic on their website and get it to the top of Google.
Appearing well positioned in Google, or any other web search engine, is not something easy, much less fast.
Like I always say:
- The SEO optimization of a website is not a speed race; It’s a very long triathlon!
Therefore, to improve or maintain good SEO over time, it is necessary to continuously audit and thus know how our website performs and what improvements it needs.
I want to be honest: doing an SEO audit is not technically complicated, although we need specific knowledge that I show in this post, as well as the techniques we use and the procedures for it have your free SEO and accessibility audit done by the experts. But, if you do not want to complicate yourself or do not have time to implement this teaching yourself, do not hesitate to leave everything in the expert hands, contact us and thus achieve results more quickly. Do you want to see what processes I am talking about? We will see how to do an SEO audit like any web design and digital marketing company.
What is an SEO audit?
SEO is a well-known and widespread concept in the world of web positioning, the Internet, and marketing in general; there is no doubt about that! Many professionals, more inexperienced than a web page design and development company, have a clear idea of how to implement basic SEO or, at least, are aware of its importance.
Despite this, I constantly collide with a reality that is entirely unheard of for me (and this word is worth it for today’s topic), and that is that online business owners are desperate to conquer Google, generate traffic and close sales, invest for this, a lot of money in SEO plans or marketing plans, of any marketing that exists today. Still, they overlook the most crucial thing: start any campaign on the Internet by doing an SEO audit.
An SEO audit is like a complete x-ray of our website where you can find out which aspects of our SEO work and which require urgent improvements.
This audit is an exhaustive SEO web analysis carried out on a web page to determine its performance. It is used to obtain data on those metrics to measure SEO. That is essential to act accordingly to achieve good positioning. in search engines and to attract the target audience. It is like an x-ray that allows us to track which aspects of our SEO are working as they should and which require urgent improvements.
What tools are used in an SEO audit?
To audit the state of “SEO health” of our website, it is necessary to rely on various tools that evaluate its most critical aspects. Although each expert uses the ones that best suit their purpose or style, we all agree to use the following.
The star tools of an SEO audit are those of Google:
- Google Analytics,
- Google Tag Manager,
- Google Search Console y
- Google PageSpeed Insights.
Other tools that, although they are not from the giant search engine, are very useful when carrying out an audit are:
- SEMRush,
- Screaming Frog,
- WebSite Auditor,
- Ahrefs the
- DeepCrawl;
Of course, you do not have to use them all at once!
How to do an SEO audit? Step-by-step guide
Before telling you where to start auditing our website, we must know that there are three fundamental aspects when evaluating the performance and positioning of a website. Why? Because many professionals evaluate and audit very well but do not know what they should measure.
Therefore, an SEO audit must measure 3 technical aspects of our website:
- Technical SEO encompasses all the technicalities of hosting, indexing, web loading speed, etc.
- Aspects on our page ( SEO on the page ) are related to the content we publish and the keywords and phrases in which you try to position yourself.
- Off-page SEO is all off-page strategies to win over search engines and give your business relevance, such as getting more traffic, gaining valuable backlinks, etc.
Together, they are the key to charting a good SEO strategy. Must measure each aspect mentioned, which is why an efficient SEO audit must provide us with data regarding them.
Start the SEO audit with a crawl of your website.
The first thing to do in an SEO audit is to crawl our website; If not, how do we detect possible failures? Or how do we make sure everything works correctly? The tracking is a diagnosis that offers the first clues and indications about which should carry out optimizations on our website.
There are several tools for us to track our website like any advertising management company in Google Ads; some are very useful, such as SEO Spider from Screaming Frog, which is tremendously complete, especially the paid version, or Xenu’s Link Sleuth, a more straightforward but utterly free software.
Check that your website has not been penalized by Google.
Google has many allies when it comes to penalizing; In recent years, we have seen how the largest search engine in the world has made an effort to detect fraudulent pages of poor quality and whose content is of little value. Those web pages that do not comply with Google standards earn a penalty, manual or algorithmic.
When doing an SEO audit, we must ask ourselves if our website has been penalized by Google; many are in this situation and have not even heard of it! With Google Search Console, we can know if we have any penalties on our shoulders from the Google algorithms: Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird.
Starting marketing actions or even SEO strategies without first getting rid of a penalty of this type is wasting money.
Take a look at your sitemap.
Generating a Sitemap or site map of our website is essential for any SEO strategy. The sitemap helps search engines to treat our website properly and to find all its information correctly.
A good SEO audit should reveal if our page map works optimally. What to expect from a perfect sitemap? That it is registered in Google Search Console (if not, it is as if it did not exist), that the URLs that we include in it are not more than 50 thousand, that they do not contain errors, and that the newest content of our website is updated in the site map.
If, when auditing our website, any of these factors do not measure up, then we must include making these improvements in our SEO optimization plan.
Check that the versions of your website are navigable.
These days, when having a website that is Mobile First is crucial for a good ranking, it is common to find a website with several conflicting versions of it. It is harmful to our SEO optimization since the search engine will not know how to classify you or which version of you to show.
Some situations usually discovered in an SEO audit are that duplicate versions are accessing our website through HTTP and HTTPS or that the desktop version is confused with the mobile one, among other things.
Verify that you are compatible with mobile devices
In the previous point, I commented that nowadays, a website must be compatible with mobile devices, either with a responsive or adaptive web design, so that it conquers search engines like Google, which give so much importance to this matter.
Well, in this part of the SEO audit, we have to evaluate that this compatibility is a fact and that everything is going from strength to strength. It is essential because even if we spend a fortune on SEO or marketing campaigns and paid advertising, we will not get a reasonable conversion rate and traffic if people cannot find you from the desired version; Mobile or computer.
Remember that more than 60% of the searches made every day come from a mobile device; are you going to be left behind?
Check your tags
Tags (TAGS) are crucial in indexing a page in search engines and can send search engines the correct information. Titles are so important for SEO because they are concise, can (and should) include keywords that will make you rank, and search for the perfect keywords.
Now, during an SEO audit, we must verify that the structure of our web page is solid and practical, as provided by the tags. To ensure good SEO optimization, check title tags, meta tags, ALT tags for images, and canonical URLs (“rel=canonical” tags).
Make sure your internal linking has no problems.
When done correctly, internal linking brings a lot of value to our website, both to SEO and to the user experience. Search engines value user experience (UX) almost above anything else, which is why they rank better those web pages whose internal linking is helpful to the public.
However, when linking internally between sections of our website and blog, problems such as broken links can appear along the way. So we have to technically audit our linking to detect if there are orphan pages (those that are not linked from other pages), how our click depth is doing (how many clicks a specific page gains from the home page), and of course, if there are broken links!
There are several tools to do this check, but one of the most used is WebSite Auditor.
Analyze your content; key in the SEO audit!
One of the most relevant aspects when doing an SEO audit is to know if our content is of quality or not. No one will ever gain traffic and rank if their content is low-quality or thin, the low-value content that Google censors.
By analyzing our web content and its search engine positioning, we will know if it is helpful to the reader if it is written correctly, readable, enjoyable, clear, and contains the correct keywords or phrases. It is not about saturating our website daily with straightforward and low-quality content. Still, we would have to publish frequently for the search engine to detect and classify us.
Making an effort in the content we publish is critical so that our website is not considered low quality or spam, and we can climb to the top of the search engines.
Relying on keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner or software that shows us how search engines will read our web content, such as Browser, makes this part of the SEO audit much more accessible.
Detecting which aspects of our content do not fit our SEO strategy will help us choose the correct strategies for our website. Will it be the length of your posts? The images? Is there keyword stuffing in them? Are the texts not understandable? Let’s analyze and get answers!
Check your page load time.
Internet is the world of the instant; no one wants to wait. To provide a pleasant user experience, both Google and the other search engines rank better on web pages that load at lightning speed. The loading speed of our website is a fundamental aspect of SEO, both to rank better and to lower the bounce rate.
We must test the speed of your web page with Google PageSpeed Insights. Thus we will discover if our website looks like a digital turtle or loads as fast as Google expects.
Statistics reveal that those web pages that take between 1 to 3 seconds to load a page have a 32% chance that people will bounce on them. We can imagine this figure going through the roof if it takes longer.
Evaluate how your HTTPS pages are doing
I think by now, most websites are already HTTPS. It means that they are considered safe sites by search engines.
Since we already know the relationship between secure web pages with SSL and SEO positioning, it is illogical that we can achieve a high ranking. In contrast, the ‘Not secure’ label continues to appear when accessing our website.
Ignoring this, because we are already working on HTTPS, we must evaluate how the content of our website works in safe mode. When auditing an HTTPS page, it is expected that we find problems associated with “rel=canonical” tags, redirects, broken links, or mixed content. Again, WebSite Auditor can help us detect these issues.
Evaluate the primary metrics of your website
There are many metrics we should not neglect if we want to improve the SEO positioning of our website.
To evaluate the main ones, such as the bounce rate, the ease of tracking our pages, or the loading speed, we must rely on Google Analytics, perhaps the best tool to obtain new data from our website.
There are about 35 metrics we can measure with this fabulous Google tool, but if you don’t have time, you should focus only on the 3 most important ones, the Core Web Vitals.
Take a look at your external linking.
External linking or backlinks can do a lot for us in search engines. Still, suppose such linking is considered to come from disreputable sites, low-value sites, or external link farms. In that case, we are in serious trouble with search engines.
How to know who links us? Majestic is a simple tool with which we can find out which web pages have a link to our website, and thus we can know if this suits us or not.
If a link to our website does not suit us, we must use the Disavow Google tool to disavow these links.
Do not ignore your external linking when doing an SEO audit, as this aspect is essential to improve your results.
Research your competition
Many do not like to snoop around their main competitors. Still, I think most SEO experts agree that an effective SEO audit of a website should include an analysis of our competition. No one is ever so strong that they don’t want to know how their competitors are doing.
It is not about investigating them to copy their SEO strategies, but to find out what techniques can help us position for specific keywords, for example, or what type of content they publish steals the traffic we have long longed for.
Investigating our competition leaves us with a small treasure of data with which we can cunningly continue to fight. Let’s not underestimate them!
As if that were not enough, we are not only interested in knowing who our competition is to ‘end it’ (I’m kidding, hehe); instead, we can create ties of friendship with some competitors and start sharing content with them, known as a guest post, which will translate into an excellent Off Page SEO strategy for both parties.
Check how your online presence is doing on social networks.
Social networks are the boom of the moment; millions of people are active on them every day, and the content shared through their platforms has a massive reach that cannot miss.
No website can achieve success if it is invisible on social networks. From there, we earn a significant amount of traffic, and it is not a secret that Google considers the trends in these platforms to prioritize these topics in its searches. In other words, what is the case of the moment on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and all other networks? It goes viral in search engines and becomes the day’s topic. Let’s get them talking about us on social media, and we’ll generate lots and lots of traffic.
When auditing our website, let’s analyze the social engagement of our website and quantify how much interaction, likes, followers, etc., we get on each social platform separately. It will show how our brand is evolving on social networks and which platforms are more profitable for us. We will also know what type of content is more successful for them.
Conclusion: an SEO audit is essential for any marketing action!
SEO optimization is constant work; no matter how optimized our website is, we will always need to keep our SEO to perfection.
Suppose we are thinking of using new strategies to improve the performance of our business. In that case, I recommend that we start by doing an SEO audit before investing in an ambitious SEO or digital marketing strategy. That way, we will know which way to go and what aspects of our website require adjustments as soon as possible.
Let’s focus on technical parameters like loading speed, bounce rate, content quality, broken links, tags, internal and external linking, and being Mobile First. Then we’ll be ready for the next step.
With this step-by-step, we can do an SEO audit ourselves, like a professional; I invite you to send us your questions and comments and tell us if you have managed to audit your business. Are we waiting for your answers?
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